The first question I would like to ask is what is considered bullying? It may seem like a simple question, but it probably has a very complicated answer. Does two friends making jokes about each other count as bullying? Or what about someone spreading a rumor? When a bigger kid pushes down a smaller kid or hits him, that is textbook bullying. Nowadays, it's harder to draw that line.
We could label bullying as when one person tries to put someone down, and the other is put down. When someone calls a person "stupid" and the name-caller is trying to make them feel bad, it may seem that that's obvious bullying. But is that where we draw the line? Lets go a step further.
We could label bullying as when one person is put down, regardless of the others intentions. Maybe when a friend makes a joke about another, they think it is harmless, but the other may get really upset. Like the poetry clip in class, those guys had no idea their friend was homosexual, and yet they would call him "fag" in a derogatory fashion, and it got to be so much that he ended up killing himself. Sounds like bullying to me, to the extreme, even if they weren't trying to be bullies.
Now with the advent of the internet (created of course by none other than Al Gore), we have this thing called "cyberbullying." It's the same thing as bullying, just via phone lines and satellites. Where bullying would just happen in the classroom, cyberbullying can happen anywhere. Luckily, I never had to deal with cyberbullying, as Facebook and similar sites were just barely coming on to popularity.
Cyberbullying can be done by anyone, girls and boys both, and not just the bigger kids. But who does it more? For guys, physicality is the prevalent way of bullying. Pushing others down, hitting them, etc is the way to show others who's boss. Girls however, are usually the back-stabbing type of bullies. They would rather talk behind someone's back than confront them, and Facebook and associated sites allow them to do this easier. Now they don't even have to be around other people to talk bad about them.
Questions:
1) Will there ever be a day when the popularity of Facebook dies down like Myspace, or will it keep getting bigger, and along with that cyberbullying?
2) Is there a foolproof way to stop cyberbullying?
i like the idea of your first question but dont know if it will ever stop, technology is becoming bigger.
ReplyDelete1) One thing Facebook does really well is change itself to fit the web trends. As twitter gained popularity Facebook mimicked the post techniques they used. People always complain about the Facebook changes, but that's what keeps Facebook fresh. Because they are so active with this I don't think facebook will die down, at least not for a long time.
ReplyDelete2) No. There's not a foolproof way to stop anything on the internet.